I wish Linus & co would distance themselves from these people.
He actively dislikes the GPLv3, has a good working relationship with Google on Android and ChromeOS, and has criticized attitudes in the Linux desktop community for over a decade. He famously roasted his own distribution's package maintainer for wasting their life.
All hats off to him, frankly. The Linux community can be extremely delusional at times.
Linus has hated GPLv3 since at least 2006.
Linux development has been over 80% corporate funded for over a decade. FOSS contributors do not have enough talent or interest to maintain the kernel for even a few weeks. If corporate interests weren't in the kernel, the kernel would not run on modern devices, period. It would have fallen behind the times and been abandoned like countless other technologies, or replaced with a new proprietary kernel from someone else.
Linux on the desktop is not somewhat usable in spite of corporate interests. Linux on the desktop is usable today because of corporate interests.
It's actually the other way around: This is a collaborative corporate project, with corporate employees contributing, but there are some random community members who can knock at the door politely and are lucky to get code into the kernel.
The community-first development model died about 2 decades ago. When the Linux Foundation talks about "community," they are talking about their corporate contributors and their communities, not us. This is also why I cringe at the excessive (not all, just excessive) hate for corporations in the online community. Without their work, rip out 80%-90% of the kernel commits every year for the last decade, and see how advanced Linux would be.
This same change is also underway at another open source project - Blender; which is now increasingly corporate funded and developed. When I see online forum posts arguing that Blender is a perfect example of how we can beat the corporations as a community, I just shake my head now.
Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that.
The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the product (except Red Hat, SuSe etc). Google, Facebook, etc, just need a good OS to run their billions of servers on.
> so we can fork when their interests stop aligning with ours
You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time.
That is also fine from the perspecitve of Free Software. The 4 freedoms do not include "the program must be maintainable with little enough manpower for people to do it in their free time, free of independence on corporate interests":
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? Why is more automatically treated as better than less?
> The GPL is great in that it gives large power to users of the software, no matter if those users are corporate or personal, and even if the makers of the software are mostly corporations.
Indeed, I respect the wisdom and forethought of Stallman greatly in drafting the GPL.
B. Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; CPUs, GPUs, power management, etc. Without corporate interests, try running Linux 2.2 from 1999 on a modern PC (which came out just before the $1B IBM investment). See how well it works. Fork modern 2025 Linux, and try running it on a computer that comes out in 2028. See if it even boots. If Intel's only done a minor refresh, it might work; if it's something bigger like the split to P cores and E cores, expect a brick. Even if it does boot, don't be surprised if it crashes, acts unstable, has borked performance, broken sleep/wake, broken audio, broken USB, you name it, it's probably broken.
C. A forked Linux would not have the same level of security research behind it. For example, the Linux 4 era was marked by the introduction of fuzzers and the fixing of countless bugs. A C codebase with handwritten Assembly is rather unlikely to ever become bug-free. How well would your forked non-corporate codebase handle Spectre and Meltdown, just an example, with Google's experts contributing the technique for fixing these problems efficiently (Retpoline)?
D. Added to the above, this isn't a hypothetical: The FSF didn't like the practice of proprietary firmware blobs being in the kernel; so they made their own commercial-interest-free version of Linux called Trisquel. It still uses commercially written code if it's open source; so even it can't be called completely free of commercial influence. The kicker: It runs on almost nothing, and people were complaining about how it works on nothing 13 years ago.
TL;DR: A forked Linux, is a broken Linux, that will never run well on newer hardware, and will quickly become insecure.
In practice, I'm going to be honest and blunt, it's never worked.
3 decades of trying to replace Photoshop with GIMP (founded 1995)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to unsettle Windows with the Linux desktop (KDE, 1998)? Barely a dent.
3 decades of trying to beat 3D packages with Blender (founded 1994)? Finally working now, ironically only because corporations started getting involved. Before then, Blender 2.7 was never going to do it.
2 decades of Apache trying to kill Skype with OpenMeetings (founded 2007)? Not even a dent.
2 decades of trying to kill proprietary CAD packages with FreeCAD (founded 2002)? Not even a dent.
4 decades of trying to beat Microsoft Office with what is now LibreOffice (roots in StarOffice, 1985, which was ironically a proprietary corporate project for the first decade and a half)? Barely a dent.
The Linux community, and FOSS communities, overestimate their strength without corporate interests. They have none.
> Why should I care that Microsoft Office has more users than LibreOffice?
And all our customers often send us MS Office documents. They never use the fancy features.
I'm confused. Is FOSS is something more than someone or some entity contributing their time and releasing the source for for free? Does it really matter if thing doing the development is a a person in a garage or a company?
There doesn't seem to be a lot of difference to me. Both a people in garages and a company have kept their pet projects going for decades, giving away their efforts over all that time. Both people in garages and and companies have lost interest in open source projects. As an example Debian is one of the longest lived open source projects on the planet. It is a community drive development. To me it looks likely it will outlast Ubuntu, which is a fork that isn't community driven.
The central tenants that make FOSS work don't seem to have much to do with whether it's community driven or not. Both can succeed. Yes, community driven efforts can fail. But so can corporate drive FOSS, as WordPress may well demonstrate.